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Left parliamentary group in the Bundestag (March 2020)
Photo: Jörg Carstensen / picture alliance / dpa
On the morning after the election debacle, the leaders of the left did not bother to gloss over the result.
The party crashed to 4.9 percent in the federal election, losing almost half of its 2017 electorate.
Party leader Susanne Hennig-Wellsow spoke of a "severe defeat".
In order to get to the most gratifying aspect of the Bundestag election for the party: "We will move into the Bundestag as a parliamentary group with 39 members."
In fact: The left has failed because of the five percent hurdle, which actually decides whether a party can move into the Bundestag or not - and will still sit in parliament, even with the important parliamentary group status.
How is that possible?
The reason for this is the so-called
basic mandate clause
. It stipulates that a party may move into the Bundestag with a share of the vote below five percent if it was
able to
win
at least three direct mandates
. This is exactly what the Left succeeded in doing, in Berlin and Leipzig: Gregor Gysi won the most first votes in his constituency of Treptow-Köpenick with 35.4 percent, Gesine Lötzsch with 25.4 percent in Lichtenberg. Sören Pellmann was able to win the particularly competitive Leipzig-Süd constituency with 22.8 percent. All three had already won direct seats in these constituencies in the 2017 federal election.
It is not the first time that the party has benefited from this clause. As early as 1994 - at that time still as PDS - it won four direct mandates and 4.4 percent of the second votes and thus received 26 seats on the state lists. At that time, however, it was not allowed to form a parliamentary group, only a "group" - with fewer financial resources and, above all, fewer parliamentary rights. For example, groups in the Bundestag are only allowed to put small and large questions to the government to a limited extent.
This time, however, the left can even form
a parliamentary
group, although there is also a five percent threshold here.
This is because the hurdle in this case does not relate to the proportion of all valid second votes - but to the
proportion of the seats in the Bundestag
.
Here the party comes over the hurdle: The 39 seats on the left correspond to 5.3 percent of the total of 735 seats in the new Bundestag.
It is understandable that party leader Hennig-Wellsow also spoke of a "black eye" when describing the defeat.
She has Lötzsch, Gysi and Pellmann to thank for getting away with it.
At the same time, the result is a warning for the party: the left cannot rely on always winning three direct mandates.
fdi